1. Field
This application generally relates to hand-held camcorders, specifically to hand-held camcorders made with a side-mounted manual focus wheel.
2. Prior Art
Presently, several models of hand-held camcorders are made with a small manual focus wheel mounted on the side of the camcorder. A user manually focuses the camcorder by rotating the focus wheel with the tip of his or her finger(s). There are several disadvantages to this small focus wheel:                a) The small size and placement of the focus wheel is awkward for the user, and can only be manipulated using the tip of the finger or fingers.        b) The small size of the focus wheel only allows for a limited amount of rotation, thereby only permitting users to manually focus in small, erratic increments.        c) The limited amount of rotation allowed by the small focus wheel makes it impossible for the user to manually create a long, smooth, focal transition. Instead the user can only manually create short, rough, focal transitions.        